


we're always somewhere between leaving and arrived

by checkpoints



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/F, Post-Canon, ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-17 03:08:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29093247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/checkpoints/pseuds/checkpoints
Summary: Not quite missing chips, but close enough.
Relationships: Kady Orloff-Diaz/Julia Wicker, past William "Penny" Adiyodi/Kady Orloff-Diaz
Comments: 6
Kudos: 19





	we're always somewhere between leaving and arrived

The drone of the hallway fluorescents seemed to weigh heavier with every slow second that passed. Kady shook a hand through her curls, nails scraping dully at her scalp. Somewhere in the distance, a car alarm wailed.

Barely an hour ago, she had stepped out for air, confident that the penthouse was empty. Barely an hour ago, the extra layer of barrier wards she had taken to maintaining ever since the World Seed incident had still been intact. Barely an hour ago, a razor-sharp spike of anxiety was not sinking its way deeper and deeper into her gut with every slow second that passed. One breath in, and it sank further. One breath out, it sank in again. Kady shoved both hands into her pockets with a frustrated half-snort.

Earlier in the day, an unexpected visitor might not have been a concern, but Pete was gone and office hours were hours past over. It was late. Still early enough that the sky was only mostly bruised through — reds, and oranges, and some few stray streaks of yellow managing to peek past the steady darkening spread of night — but late. Wards had gone up, and now they were down.

Kady stared unblinking at the door. She inhaled, and she did not move. Minutes felt stretched into years. The fluorescents went on humming.

Kady exhaled, and at last, she reached out.

The metal of the handle was unnaturally cold, icy sting cutting nearly to the bone. Her grip tightened to the point of white-knuckled strain. Almost without conscious effort, the door eased open.

A lone flame awaited her in the hearth. It shrank and then grew, dancing an odd and unnatural sort of dance. It flickered and flowed. An out of place fire in an out of place season, the unbroken constant of summer humidity still baring down on every inch of city it could reach.

The fire slowed. The fire stilled, no more than the image of what once was movement. Kady blinked, and the fire roared back to life.

Magic, she realized. It swayed from one direction to the next, cascades of light absent any evidence of wood or of heat spilling out to cast erratic shadows over the whole of the place. Kady glanced slow to the windows, their curtains let loose and halfway drawn. Outside, the final traces of daylight flickered out beneath a rising sea of clouds. The magic flame danced, and danced, and danced.

A ghost from a past life lie tucked away in the corner of the couch, nearly silhouetted against that magic glow. She wore an oversized gray blouse and a pair of earthy brown slacks. Her long dark hair was caught somewhere on the edge of disheveled, some small traces of a blowout still desperately clinging to shape, and when her deep amber eyes finally registered Kady’s presence, they seemed almost to flicker in tune with the strength of the flame. Dull and then bright. One way and the next.

The ghost greeted Kady with a vacant smile, highball glass full of something dark and something mixed pressed gently to her lower lip. Burgundy liquid flecked with minuscule somethings that caught the light and didn’t rolled steady from side to side. The glass dug in harder.

“Julia,” Kady said. The ghost’s smile did not reach her eyes.

But, “I hope you don’t mind,” she answered, and Kady laughed a low laugh.

There was something heavy in way Julia carried herself. Kady laughed, but she feared to know what it meant. It was consuming. It was there all the way down to the blankness in her expression. All the way down to the still in the way she watched the distance close, like her shade itself had retreated so far into the core of her that it may as well have been lost all over again: lips barely parted and eyes dulled with absence.

It was there in the fire, flickering, flaring, and ebbing, and flowing in tune with that crystalline amber of her eyes. Fractals of light shaped out into every past moment she had worn that very look.

Kady inhaled slow through her nostrils and held the air trapped until her lungs burned with strain, but Julia didn’t react, evidently content to watch impassive and still before taking another slow sip of her drink. The fire crackled. Her eyes flickered.

Kady exhaled. She took a seat just slightly too far into Julia’s space. Still, the expression did not twitch, and still, that heavy something in her eyes did not falter. But her body reacted. She tucked her knees up near her chest in acknowledgment or welcome, balancing the glass gingerly in the space between both. Condensation dripped down and bled into the twill. Kady said nothing, but Julia smiled that same half-smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes, and against all conscious thought, Kady responded in kind. It lasted barely seconds before she forced herself to look away.

There was a time when she might have reacted differently. Instead, she looked away.

Stress relief, they’d called it the first time their silence carried that same heavy something. After Penny’s first death, and after Kady made a decision that she still only some days considered a mistake.

Stress relief, they’d called it the next: hard, fast, breathless, and with no strings attached, because they were Best Bitches, emotionally advanced, and stuck in the charred out after of worlds crumbling down with no urge to do anything but wield their hurt like weapons. So, who could blame them, really?

Stress relief, they’d settled on every time after. Because if Kady had learned anything from the final loss of the only real Penny, it was just how much trying stole from you in the end. Because if Kady knew anything in the after of hurt, it was that she could not would not ever allow trying to take Julia from her, too. Because even though the world kept ending, and even though their friends kept dying, and undying, and deciding their timelines weren’t home anymore, and, _hey, number forty sounds pretty great,_ they were still there. They were still together. And they would never be anything more than Best Bitches, because trying tasted too much like loving, and the only place loving ever landed Kady was alone.

Best Bitches, for better or worse. Kady breathed in, breathed out, and she spoke.

“If you’re gonna break into my place after a year of radio silence and make yourself at home, the least you can do is tell me what that monstrosity is,” she said, eyes returning to linger on the twitch of a not-quite-smirk at the edges of Julia’s mouth.

It vanished quickly enough not to matter. The glass sparkled in the firelight. Julia licked her lips slow and took another drink, gaze strong enough to force Kady’s to match — magnetic something too powerful to comprehend — and she shrugged. Her shoulders moved with impossible fluidity and grace. Her voice, however, was tired. Fraying rasped edges no longer content with the edges.

“Spiced…something. El taught me a spell and told me to get lost; how did he put it…?” She trailed off, brows dipping slightly lower in concentration. A beat passed and her chin tipped inward as her voice took on a faintly musical lilt and fell whole vocal ranges deeper. “ _Take this very important diagram and fuck off. Brakebills doesn’t have room for all of our miseries tonight.”_

“Gross,” Kady said. She did not address the sudden, nearly palpable shift in mood. She did not address the implication that _get lost_ meant _find Kady._ She did not address the bitter tang of trying it presented. “Wouldn’t have taken you for a magic cocktail kind of girl.”

“I contain multitudes.” Julia tipped the glass back, not stopping until the whole of what remained was emptied and gone. Her throat was bared to the full force of firelight: brush strokes of color touching and untouching her skin. A drop of water gathered at the bridge between glass and touch before sliding down the soft curve of her wrist, equal parts unhurried and unnoticed.

“Hm,” Kady grunted. She forced herself to remain still. The silence grew heavier and heavier, one steady second at a time.

As always, Julia was the first to relent. Her face slipped back to that mysterious heavy something. She licked her lips, and they parted slow. “It’s hard to tell what might set him off lately. Most days it’s something easy enough, but sometimes he starts thinking about Alice, or Margo, or… _Q._ And the whole night just kind of…”

Kady couldn’t bring herself to look away. Carefully, she breathed in. Carefully, she breathed out.

“These days, we’re all we’ve got.” A bitter sort of smile spread across Julia’s lips. It did not reach her eyes. She leaned to the side and placed the glass on the carpet, just out of reach.

When she returned to sitting, the smile was gone, wiped away by that empty, heavy something. At her back, the flames fell, and rose, and washed her in forevers of hazy light.

“So,” Kady tried. She cleared her throat and did not glare at the gentle in-out of Julia’s laughter. Neither did she look to see whether it had finally, finally reached her eyes. “No kid, huh? Penny give you the night off?”

Julia’s expression gave nothing away.

“Something like that,” she said, nearly a whisper.

She blinked once, and the beautiful amber of her irises flickered suddenly out of tune with the fire. She blinked again, and though Kady did not know how, she knew she had made a mistake. The fire wavered, and Julia began retreating further into the corner of the couch. It swayed, and Kady reached without thinking to stop her. Far too close to trying _,_ but she reached regardless. Her fingers brushed the bare skin of one ankle, and Julia froze with an immediacy that seemed to upset even the still of the moment. The fire whipped once to the side. Something moving, now slowed.

Kady did not speak. Julia did not move. Seconds passed, and they sat together in that steady back and forth of shadow and light.

Until, at last, “Jules,” Kady said. The name felt all wrong against her tongue. It tasted like trying. But she kept her thumb pressed firm to Julia’s ankle, and the pulse beating beneath did not so much as hitch. “If something’s wrong, we can…talk.”

“Hm.” A syllable carried on a breath.

“Or, we could…” The words died somewhere near the base of Kady’s throat. They hadn’t seen each other in a year and hadn’t touched each other in longer. There was no point in asking. There was no point in trying.

In the silence that followed, an answer came regardless. That steady, unyielding gaze fixed itself on Kady and refused to let go. Julia’s lips pursed together and parted again, indecisive something drawing her brows momentarily down and then back. Words, unformed in the silence. Words, unformed in the darkness. The fire danced, and danced, and danced.

“No,” Julia said.

Kady blinked, and she was not disappointed because she had not tried.

“No, I don’t think that’s what I want.” As she spoke, the whole of Julia’s focus slipped off into middle distance.

Everything but the fire was still for too many too-long seconds. It sparked something that was not shaped like disappointment to life in the space behind Kady’s ribs. She had not tried, and so the feeling couldn’t have been that.

But then Julia moved, reaching out to cover Kady’s hand with her own, and the impossible soft of her palm as it slid over knuckles washed the feeling in something else entirely.

“Oh,” Kady breathed.

The awful, ugly something that was not disappointment fought to resurface, begging through the churn of new touch to ask, _then why are you here,_ because the day had been long, and because they hadn’t spoken in months, and because trying never worked. But she refused to let that part of herself touch Julia again. Not after the last time. Not after Julia reached out, smaller and more hesitant than she had maybe ever been, and all Kady could think to do was glare with everything in her and say, _I’m clean,_ before spewing some line about sidekicks and how Penny was the only reason they ever grew close.

She smothered that ugly, distant part of herself even further beneath the surface before it could find voice in the parts of herself that wanted and tried.

“I could really use a friend, though. Come here?” Julia said, or maybe asked, voice oddly small and oddly hesitant as her touch slipped away. Both hands came to rest on the still damp reminder of condensation at her knees.

There was an out being presented. Kady was smart enough to take it. They were Best Bitches, not the sort of people that held each other close on melancholy nights. Standing and moving to put space between them and the moment should have been the easiest choice in the world. Except that then she leaned closer, and Julia welcomed her into her arms and into the uncomfortable makeshift mattress of couch cushions too overstuffed to stay standing against the weight of two bodies.

At the last possible moment, Kady hesitated. She watched on, silent as Julia lie down and smiled that smile that never quite reached her eyes. Just ahead, the fire swayed, and dimmed, and grew all over again. Julia blinked slow, and Kady did, too. The fire crackled. Shadows danced.

Julia asked, “Good?”

“Yeah. Good,” Kady said, dropping her head into the sharp dip of Julia's shoulder.

She did not know and could not remember the specific moment their conversation turned to nothing and released them both to the slow drift of sleep — it might have been minutes, or hours, or forevers spun out across rings of time until they wrapped back around into something wholly less — only that she woke the next morning to frantic pounding at the door and Julia soundly asleep beneath her. She shoved herself off the couch and resolved to never let it happen again.

Exactly seven days later, it happened again.

The first six were quiet. The seventh was not.

It was a safe house run by strangers that knew her on nothing more than a reputation of intimidation. Walls covered in peeling paint faded green with time, and boarded up windows, and checkerboard tile flooring cracked nearly to rubble. Low-level hedges with too much ambition and not enough forethought caught square in the grip of a slowly spreading curse. A favor for a friend. Hushed whispers, and offers, and promises. _The new Marina,_ only ever in short bursts of quiet when they thought her attention was taken. _Marina, Marina, Marina._

Kady refused payment and slipped out the back door as soon as the situation was stable.

She stood outside for minutes, or hours, or more, cigarette butts and paper runoff from the dumpster the next alley over littering a path out to the street. The upsetting crunch of it all may as well have been the only grounding force left on earth.

Her head wouldn’t stop pounding. The city wouldn’t stop screaming. Noise, everywhere, louder and louder by the second. She shut her eyes to it all and let her body crack apart into a thousand tiny pieces. Time slowed, and stuttered, and stilled to a stop before even the first broken fragment could reach out and touch ground.

In another time, Kady might have hated the hedges. She might even have hated herself for falling face-first into a Rube Goldberg machine of inherited debt that went on, and on, and on without end. Forty timelines. Forty lifetimes. Surely, she thought, one of them.

But not hers. Not now. They were her family, no matter how comfortably resentment settled in the pit of her stomach. She couldn’t hate them. Maybe before, but never again.

Even after a lifetime of living with the consequences of choices made for her. Even after her mother fell in too deep with the wrong people and sold her like property. Even after Marina used her like one more tool to be broken on her path to true power. Even after Penny fell in love, even after Penny learned the truth, even after Penny cared enough to love her more and for all that trouble died slow, and pained, and drowning in the terms of a billion-year contract only to be replaced by a pale imitation from another failed timeline with the audacity to claim he could ever have known what the _real_ Penny wanted, and who stole away her best friend’s goddesshood, and her magic, and then got her pregnant, and —

And. Even after a city’s worth of hedges pointed at her and decided she was their person out of some collective sense that she was physically incapable of caring less or saying no. She could hate a lot of things. She was very good at hating things. But not the hedges.

Not even knowing that the sting of it all would remain with her until the end of time unless she finally, finally left. Unless she hated. A thousand rusted knives perched in sheaths of open wound pointed straight at her heart. But not the hedges. Not the hedges.

Somewhere in the distance, time ticked its first step back toward motion. Every fragile piece of her settled back in its proper place off the wave of sigh. Her hearing was slow to return, but she opened her eyes, gaze not quite focused, and a set of taillights whipped through the whole of sight to stir up what trash was still near and uncrushed by the weight of her boots.

On the other side of the street, a dive bar’s lights flashed on. Kady forced herself to look away, and she did not wince at the responding snap of muscle strain.

Instead, she shuffled her way home, unthinking until she was uncaring. Uncaring, until she reached her front door. Until the absence of her personal wards shot awareness like ice through her every last vein. Until it felt as if she might step inside to find any number of horrible, unknowable calamities far worse than the few that came before.

Somewhere down the hall, two someones yelled louder and louder. Kady bit down a grimace and forced her door open.

Her only intruder was Julia.

Julia, who sat half-bent over the kitchen island, eyes held firm on her drink. Something on the rocks. She didn’t smile, but her eyes lit up like twin stars at the first trace of recognition.

“Rough day at the office?” she asked.

For one awful moment, Kady did not react. She stood rooted to the spot and stared Julia down like a puzzle that might be solved through nothing more than the force of unbroken eye contact. But Julia took a sip of her drink, slow enough to ease Kady back, and every still-lingering trace of tension evaporated itself to nothing.

Kady let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding, rolled her eyes, and let her body carry her closer. She lingered just long enough to take in the way the sun and the dark warred to paint Julia’s features in steady dimming streaks of pastel light.

Then, she grunted. No words felt appropriate.

A small glare caught in one window and disappeared as soon as it arrived. Julia smiled, and it did not reach her eyes. Neither did she meet Kady’s gaze.

All around them, the daylight flickered its final few gasps of life before drowning once and for all beneath the dark of the night.

Slowly, steadily, Kady blinked herself away from the pull of that smile. “One of these days, you’re gonna have to tell me how you managed to deal with the wards.” One step. Another. She rest an elbow on the edge of the island.

Bourbon swirled in circles through Julia’s glass. The pad of one finger traced the rim, tilting the surface up at harsh angles. It swam for her. It danced for her, around and around in unnatural motion. Around and around until the moment it stopped.

The surface of the drink rippled itself flat, and so too did Julia revert to that heavy, vacant something of lips barely parted. Only the smallest, most persistent pieces of the spell clung to shape long enough to be caught.

“I’d recognize your spellwork anywhere,” was all Julia said, gaze still fixed steady to the glass. A pause, a breath, and all over again, that vacant smile peeked through. One brow quirked momentarily up in a tell that vanished too quickly to read. The smile did not reach her eyes, and almost as quickly, it too was gone.

Kady tried for the briefest of moments to move past the thought that to Julia, knowing her work and knowing how to dismantle her work were one and the same, but by the time she noticed, it was already too late. It was already settled somewhere in the empty space beneath her heart, tangling together with that ugly unknowable something, and growing, and burning, and raging to life, hotter, and hotter, and hotter by the second.

It lingered. Kady cleared her throat. As if in response, the night stilled, its warmth vanishing from the air. The feeling in her chest burned hotter, but she pretended not to notice, focusing instead on the way Julia talked, and the way Julia laughed, and the way Julia did not accept her renewed offer to discuss whatever it was that was bothering her. Hours faded away into nothing.

 _Maybe later,_ Julia told her again, and again, and the words carried taste just a little too soft. Just a little too real. Just a little too much. _Not tonight, not tonight, not tonight,_ all the while smiling that smile that did not reach her eyes. Kady let herself be pushed and pulled as easily as if it had. She fell back and fell forth for the length of the evening, willingly blind to the truth and far too helpless to refuse.

Goddess-touched desperation she could never quite shake.

The next morning, Kady woke on the couch shirtless, and disoriented, and draped in a blanket she wasn’t positive she owned. Julia lie beneath her, tracing out what only barely read as spells though her curls. Nails scraped pleasantly over her scalp in arcs, and curves, and tuts similar to the motions she knew and yet somehow altogether different. Altogether her. Altogether more. Kady pretended not to notice, drifting instead through a haze of fascination. Unable to follow and unable to stop.

When she finally pretended to wake, she maintained the act of ignorance all the way to the door, where she did not flinch as Julia reached out with both hands to gently squeeze at her own. She did not flinch when Julia’s grip slipped at the last second and landed somewhere below the knuckles, crushing all of her fingers together. She did not flinch, because Julia was warm, and her touch was soft, and the feeling made pretending unawareness the easiest thing in the world.

“Thanks for the distraction,” Julia said, and though her expression went unchanged, the smallest flash of something oddly close to regret emptied from behind her eyes. It could have been in response to anything. The touch. The night. The words. It could have been anything. “Best bitches, right?”

Dawn faded slow to the pale golden light of the day. Birdsong rose and fell in the distance. The moment stretched on for eternities as Kady searched for the words, Julia’s hands an unwavering constant. One that nearly saw Kady’s composure lost long enough to squeeze back at the too-comforting weight of them.

Instead, she looked to the windows and let some few loose locks of hair fall to cover her face. She swallowed the ugly something begging to try down, and down, and down until it drowned to death in bile.

Stress relief, they used to call it. Back when they were something closer to friends in something closer to a family and the world made just a little more sense. A year of distance and Kady was demoted to distraction.

“Best bitches,” she echoed.

Julia left her with a tight-lipped smile. It didn’t reach her eyes. She didn’t return for months.

Seasons changed, weather cooled, and time drifted on the way it always did when Kady was alone: too slow, too aimless, and too tiring. Whatever nameless something _distraction_ had meant, the distance meant worse. Distance always meant worse. It meant loss, and loss meant the arrival of everything she had tried so hard to prevent. Loss meant trying.

Loss meant holding the audacity to hope when she next found the wards broken down, and hope rarely led her anywhere but ruin. Regardless, she hoped.

The penthouse was nothing but darkness. Nothing but what small scraps of moonlight managed to catch on reflection and vanish themselves back into night.

Kady’s eyes caught on a shape in the distance. Julia — she knew even without the help of clearer sight that it was her — lie curled up in the far corner of the kitchen banquette. Her eyes were glassy, glazed over and barely still open, and her lips were parted, tongue pressed to the backs of her teeth in concentration. Her every breath came so slow that for too-long moments she hardly still read as breathing; she was the unceasing steady of survival’s bare minimum, and she seemed barely aware Kady had entered at all. She looked like death in the moonlight. Kady flexed both hands slow. She moved closer.

Warm reminders of presence marked the surface of the kitchen island, visible only once she leaned her weight against it. Two empty whiskey bottles and a crowded ashtray sat perched neatly to her side, cloaked in the weakest of illusory spells. Kady watched, and she studied, and she very deliberately did not give the half-dead butterflies carving vertigo into the walls of her stomach the attention they desired. Julia did not react; she seemed barely aware of a thing beyond breathing, and thinking, and being.

It was almost too much to watch, and something deep in Kady’s throat tensed at the thought. She shut her eyes to the feeling, and the sight, and turned instead to the fireplace. Its marble frame seemed almost to glow, reflective surfaces catching the barest glimpses of moon and casting them out across the surrounding space in the world’s most mundane sort of spell. Light redirected by earth.

She pressed her palms flat together and cast the apartment in firelight with a spell decidedly more complex.

“You don’t have to do this,” came the first of Julia’s slurred deflections at the first soft suggestions of touch. Her voice was rough, all the ease of her usual rasp ground down to a near growl. Her clothes were wrinkled and stretched, and her hair was tied up loose in a messy half-bun made messier by the trim on the pillows. The empty between of fire and moonlight made her look worse than wrong; heat and cold crashed together to land in the unnerving nothing of gray. “I texted Q. He’ll be here to help me mope sooner or later.”

A nice plan. But Quentin was dead, and no one was coming.

And yet Best Bitches meant nothing if not the strength to bury down the ugliest parts of herself and leave that comment unaddressed. The moonlight vanished beneath the clouds and surfaced once again. To their side, the fire danced. Julia remained caught in the middle, an unsteady void of color flickered this way and that.

Kady sighed. They had managed aftermaths of stolen shades, souls trapped beyond worlds, and nightmares of hungry trickster gods performing to a captive audience of corpses. They would manage. She knew they would manage. And so, she stayed. She stayed, and she did not respond to the comment, and she sat herself just slightly too close to Julia’s side, their thighs bumped together as she rubbed warmth through the gauzy fabric of her shirt.

In another time, she might have commented on how cold Julia’s skin had become. She might have asked about her Penny, or her child, or where they both were, or why she wasn’t with them. Instead, she stayed silent, and instead, she held Julia close. She did not speak at all.

Time passed, and stilled, and passed once again, and eventually Julia fell limply into her shoulder. To their back, the moon wavered, and they cast oddly shaped shadows over kitchen together. Empty bottles glittered and glowed in what scraps they could catch.

And then Julia spoke.

“We met these sisters, back when…” Vowels seemed to draw themselves out almost against her awareness. Unaware struggle to enunciate every word; impossibly tired fragments of voice stitching themselves together just fully enough to be heard. “Zoe and Daniella. Penny was furious that I didn’t get what they meant at the time…I think I do, now.”

Unwilling to press further, Kady hummed a response. She held Julia closer. The seconds passed slow as they lost themselves to the quiet, but eventually, Julia stirred, and eventually, Kady helped her to her feet.

She guided Julia up the stairs. She guided her to the guest room at the end of the hall. She stood watch, protection from nothing as she undressed, and she even kept her steady beneath the scalding hot shower water. But something slipped. Julia met her eyes, and reached out, and something slipped. It tasted of stale cigarettes and old whiskey; of soot, and oak, and menthol, and spice, and their night turned suddenly hard, and fast, and breathless, and they did not speak the next morning.

Exactly seven days later, they did.

As usual, Julia was the one to break the silence. Wards had gone up, and then they were down.

And then they were up.

New barriers had replaced her own. Weak, but enough, and more than that, their construction was beautiful. The words, _I’d recognize your spellwork anywhere,_ echoed through Kady’s mind and a low chuckle escaped before she could bother to keep it contained. Letting the pads of her fingers linger on the dull buzzing edge between warning and pain, she reached out. A moment passed, oily spellframe rippling out from her touch. Another, and the next, and Kady set herself to work.

It was less than minutes before she was strolling inside, greeted by the sight of one very open balcony door and one very sober Julia leaned up against the balcony wall. A gust of wind caught her hair and tossed it over her shoulder. She hardly seemed to notice, but Kady lingered in the after. On the bright of the day, and the bite of the cold, and the white noise of the city. On the way Julia seemed so newly and so fully at peace.

Kady watched, and thought, and waited. The city went quiet, or maybe her attention found further focus, and she smiled a small smile. A half-formed, stifled sort of thing.

She took a step closer, boot heel to hardwood like the crack of a gun.

“Bold move, locking me out of my own home.” Kady sidled up to Julia’s side. The city spread out before them, an endless expanse of life. “Anyone else might think you’re looking for trouble.”

When she turned — just enough to look and not one inch more — Julia’s gaze carried kindness, real and tangible.

“Who says I’m not? I could be an evil X-Man masquerading as Julia,” she teased. The rasp was still there, threaded so thoroughly with exhaustion that it might never leave, but she sounded content in a way that felt like better times. Like she must have sounded years and years ago in those too-short days before _everything._

“I think at this point, I’d take that over our usual sort of evil,” Kady said.

An agreeable hum filled the air. Their shoulders bumped together, and Julia continued, taking on a cadence completely at odds with the her she had been just nights ago, “ _The Indestructress strikes again! Unsuspecting hedge witch taken aback!_ ”

A sharp exhale slipped free. Not quite a laugh. Kady drifted through the feeling, the look in Julia’s eyes bright enough to warm to the bone. Her face was still empty, still slack and too still, but she smiled, and for once it was all in her eyes.

“From what Pete tells me, you could use the mystery.” A beat. A breath. Julia nodded her head to the side. “Though, I may have scared him into giving up that little detail while I was kicking him out.”

“Whatever you did, I’m sure he deserved it,” answered Kady.

Julia exhaled sharply. Not quite a laugh. Not quite a smile.

“So, what’s up?” Kady asked. “You’re not usually around so early.”

Before Julia could answer, the breeze returned and dropped the chill to a freeze. Whatever words might have been died on the tip of her tongue, and instead she cast something small and quick — no more than a few one-handed tuts on the periphery of sight — until the whole of the balcony blossomed to warmth. She sighed satisfaction, eyes falling closed. One breath in, one breath out, and they opened again.

Julia said, “I’ve been thinking.”

“About?” Kady asked.

“Penny.” For what might have been minutes, that was all. “Not, like — not about him exactly, but…”

The effects of Julia’s spell were an unceasing constant, and piece by piece the time fell away.

“Do you ever think you deserve more?” Julia finally asked. It sounded less like a question or hope for an answer than the first hesitant steps toward admitting that a talk was what she really wanted.

So, Kady stayed silent. She watched, and she thought, and she waited.

“You once told me,” Julia started and then didn’t. Long, slender fingers reached out and stroked along the line of Kady’s jaw. The touch lingered for a breath and for more before trailing lines down her shoulder and falling fully away. “You once told me the only reason you were with us was because of him. I should have done more to convince you —”

“Jules, it’s okay,” Kady said, unsure whether it really was.

But Julia shook her head, and she knew in that moment that it wasn’t. “It isn’t. Kady, you need to know that out of everything I’ve done since first learning about magic, being your friend was the only part I ever got right.”

Those ugly, persistent somethings fought with everything in them to bite back, but somehow, somehow, Kady kept them buried. She stayed silent.

“Anyway, the, um…the current Penny.” Julia half-trailed off in a thought, and for the shortest moment, her tongue pressed lightly to the backs of her teeth. She gently shook herself out of it and continued. “He took our daughter and vanished over the summer.”

“…Shit.” Kady could think of nothing else to say.

Neither, it seemed, could Julia. She smiled a bitter, barely-there sort of smile, and the silence of lost minutes circled patiently above. It fell lower, and circled, and lowered again. Lower, and lower, and at last, as always, Julia shattered it to nothing. The smile didn’t reach her eyes. “I think he finally accepted that I’m not his Julia.”

For long seconds, even the ugliest parts of Kady found nothing to say. The heat of Julia’s spell fell and then rose, but the fire in her eyes roared steadily stronger.

“You two are on another quest, right? Are you sure nothing happened to him?” Kady asked.

Glancing momentarily away, Julia's brows dipped down in concentration. “No quest; just trying to bring our friends back home.” A twitch of the lips. “That was my first thought, though. It lasted maybe a day; apparently he got into it with Fogg about his contract just before he vanished, and. It’s…hard. Finding a traveler that doesn’t want to be found. There’s a whole multiverse out there.”

Kady blinked. “Shit.”

“Oh, that’s not even the worst part.” With a tired hum, Julia leaned closer. “He’s been back! More than once! Not a word to me or anyone else but Todd. You know what he wanted? Advice on raising a child.”

“ _Shit._ ” Breath hitched on the word, blurred and crumbling at the edges.

But Julia laughed, and even though it was tinged in acid, she smiled another smile that was all in the eyes, and time faded, and spilled, and mixed together with the rest of the world until the whole of existence felt condensed down to nothing but them. Nothing but tides of motion and flares of life, shifting, and cresting, and twisting into the shape of a woman named Julia Wicker.

By the time Kady realized Julia’s thumb was stroking back and forth just beneath her mouth, it hardly still occurred to her to wonder when it had happened. Faint remnants of callouses and healed-over burns scraped and then didn’t. Julia’s eyes were an unending amber fire.

Kady breathed in. She breathed out. “If you’re asking for my help —”

“I’m not,” Julia said, and she was close enough for the raspy whisper of her voice to fill the whole of Kady’s sense. “I am. Sort of. I don’t need anything from you, it’s just…Look, every time I let us drift apart like this, a part of me always feels like it’s missing. Like —”

Deja vu only ever in the worst, most inconvenient moments. An incredulous laugh bubbled the words up out of Kady's gut, “Like I’m your missing chip?”

Julia’s mouth snapped shut. Her gaze went absent in that way it tended to go: presence faded away to whole other worlds of thought. “Yes, actually.”

“Yeah. We’ve been here before.” And they had, but not quite. The last time _missing chips_ had been on the table, they were missing a soul and planning to murder a god. Everything was different.

And yet, everything was the same. They were caught in distance, caught in trying, caught in slowly blurring lines that felt too much like more. Just like always.

Just like always.

Julia’s thumb did not stop its steady back and forth. Her hand did not pull away. But she shrugged, and her spell wavered the slightest bit before settling into a new steady. The translucent oil of magic shimmered slick reminders of presence. There and then gone. There and then not. Again, and again, and again, and she said, “For what it’s worth? I never stopped wanting it. What we had. Even after I ruined it.”

A gust of wind crested over the shape of the spell, just enough to be noticed.

“Well” Kady answered. Her voice fought to stay buried. It felt too much like trying. Like the last sentinel still standing guard against more. “Turns out, I didn’t either.”

At that, Julia’s touch did still. Her thumb pressed faintly in against the corner of Kady’s lower lip just as the bright of her eyes went heavy and dark. “I want to be a part of your life again, Kady.”

Kady said nothing. She breathed hesitantly in, and she strained to breathe out.

“I miss you.” Julia’s words were close enough to taste the sharp heat of them.

A steady shrinking voice in the back of Kady’s mind reminded that Best Bitches were not whatever this was, but the longer it went on, the harder it was to listen.

“Julia —” she tried.

“I need you,” said Julia, either ignoring or rejecting outright her attempt to find balance. Her spell ebbed and then flowed, but even through that new dark, the heat in her eyes never faded.

Kady swallowed. “Julia —”

But Julia still did not stop.

“I’m not asking you to be my conscience or to hit pause on your entire life to help me do my thing.” The spell shuddered, and it seemed as if that might be it. Julia trailed off into nothing. Silence filled the air. But then she added, “I am just…so god damn tired of having choices happen _to_ me,” and her right hand rose, working with inhuman fluidity through the framework of another spell: a wave, and a twist, and a snap traveling steady from finger to finger to finger. A smooth, unbroken light flared to life in the junction between index and thumb. “So, this is me finally making one of my own: I’m choosing you.”

Kady pressed her lips tightly together. She did not answer. She did not think.

Another breeze brushed up against the balcony wall, and Julia did not move away. Her eyes flickered. Fire, and grace, and magic itself breaking through the heavy and dark. She said, “My problems are my problems. I’ll find my daughter, and I’ll bring our friends back, and I’ll probably get swept up in something new once I have, but I'm done pretending it was ever my decision to save the world. You were always the right choice. Let me prove it.”

Her gaze pressed in on Kady somehow harder than before, and so it almost went completely missed when she turned her palm toward the sky, wiping both spells away in another tide of motion that seemed to hold no true beginning or end. But only almost. The cold returned, and with it the sharpness of focus. It struck Kady breathless.

One conversation, and she had already let herself forget that Julia’s spellwork was beauty itself. So wholly and uniquely her own; so fully removed from the harsh shapes of hedge scraps or the mechanical, overrefined science of the Brakebills-taught. Julia might not have been a goddess any longer, but in that moment, the reality that she was always meant to be felt clearer than ever.

Something in her expression shifted at the thought.

Whatever it was, Julia’s changed in turn. She was still, and patient, and waiting on the edge of that offer — _I need you, even if you don’t feel the same —_ and then she wasn’t. Then, she smiled a wide, toothy smile. A smile in that uniquely Julia way: dimples, and unsteady brows, and eyes crinkled up at the edges. She smiled, and then the distance was gone, abandoned for the hard, and fast, and breathless in that uniquely Julia-and-Kady way. Fingers tangled and fisted in hair, and the balcony wall dug hard into Kady's spine, and Julia’s feet left the ground, and —

After, when the night was returned and Julia lie beside her in bed tracing out the vaguest shapes of spells over the rise and the fall of her chest, Kady thought.

She thought about her Penny, and how one of the last things he ever told her was not to stay mad for too long. _I want you to be happy,_ he’d said, and she thought he was the world’s biggest asshole for months after the fact.

She thought about the other Penny, and how he always seemed to know the exact wrong time to say the exact wrong thing about her feelings for the Penny that mattered. Dismissive, and unhelpful, and unable to see her as anything more than an addict in need of coddling.

She thought, too, about Julia. She thought about the unrelenting constant of her presence and support. Even when it was hard. Even when it wasn’t wanted. She thought about the words, _these days, we’re all we’ve got._ She thought that in the after of lives they had lived, maybe _missing chips_ was an apt enough description after all. They were cracked and fractured in uniquely mismatched ways, worn down by the calms, and the dangers, and the everything-in-betweens, and even though they almost fit together like two almost matching pieces, the only way it worked was by maiming each other on the parts that did not. The sharpest, most inconvenient truths of them.

Not quite missing chips, but close enough.

It wasn’t love, that not-quite that they were. It couldn’t have been. Not when Kady’s entire capacity for love sat so firmly in the hands of a soul trapped in the next life. But it was close enough.

It was something new, and something old, and something astonishingly stupid, and it was just — because it was always _just_ with Julia — that for the first time in a long time, Kady wanted everything that the not-quite of it promised.

Not quite missing chips, but close enough. There was happiness in that close enough.

**Author's Note:**

> the fun part of this fic was when I spent an entire day trying to figure out if “x-man” was genuinely the singular form of “x-men” for the sake of one single joke. it still sounds fake!


End file.
